Uncle Mikey's Gymnasium

Saturday, October 11, 2008

My sister Genie, who is wonderful and an amazing aunt (just like the rest of my sisters, all six of whom Sabrina adores), took Sabrina to dinner and afterward to this fun place that Sabrina still hasn't gotten over. It's along the hike and bike trail that runs around the downtown section of Lady Bird Lake (formerly Town Lake), atop a small hill on the South side of the lake (which is really the Colorado River with dams on either end). There's a disco dance floor there and Sabrina just went nuts.

She sang and danced for a very long time and wore herself out to much that Mommy had to carry her back to the car the whole way. Sabrina even cried when another family tried to take pictures on the lights. How dare they.

Sabrina's not old enough to ride in the front seat yet, but she loves her new big-girl booster seat and won't ride in anything else. We like it too because it's got good head support wings on either side and when she falls asleep back there they hold her head very nicely.

I love her little fleece coat in this picture. It's not quite cold enough here to wear it, but we let our little angel set the dress code for herself, which explains all the princess wear.

Sabrina entertains Aunt Naomi by dancing on her furniture. Naomi has invited us to her home the last two Thanksgivings and Sabrina has absolutely loved the experience both times, as have we. Naomi is a delightful host and a lovely person all around, as is her man Adam.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Just beyond belief that this isn't enough to get him thrown in jail, much less disqualified from running for President, much less not even goddamn ASKED about it by the disgustingly biased mainstream media:

Mr. Good Will - who lists his employer as "Loving" and his profession as "You" - has contributed 1,000 times to the Barack Obama campaign.

All the contributions have been in amounts of $25 or less. But they add up to $17,375 - far more than the legal limit of $4,600. That's $2,300 each for the primary and general election campaigns.

Wait. There's more:

Mr. Doodad Pro made 786 contributions for a total of $19,500. Like Mr. Good Will, Mr. Pro lists his employer as "Loving" and his profession as "You." Mr. Pro said he is from Nunda, N.Y. Directory assistance found no listing for him either.

Mr. Obama has raised a whopping $223 million in contributions of less than $200. Candidates are not required to disclose the names of those who contribute less than $200, and Mr. Obama has not. John McCain has made his complete donor database available online.

Don't stop there, you'll miss the best part:

If there are more suspicious donors to the Obama campaign, we won't know until long after the election as long as their aggregate contributions are below the legal limit. Mr. Timmerman was particularly curious about 11,500 contributions from overseas totalling $33.8 million.

Emphasis mine. Just enough already. I'm tired of one side being held to a standard beyond reasonable and the other ignored, no matter what type of shady crap they do. I'd like to punch 90% of the journalists in this country in the face. I know it would take a long time and a lot of work, but I'm a giver. Link from Instapundit.

Thomas Sowell's new column is titled "Do Facts Matter?" I wish they did, but they sure don't seem to:

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years-- including the present year-- denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today's financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration "right-wing ideology" of "de-regulation" that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

Monday, September 29, 2008

The balls on this bitch. How dare she try to pin this Democratic party disaster that is the mortgage crisis on the Republicans who repeatedly tried to stop it. "How did it sneak up on us so silently"? You idiotic skank, you were told repeatedly it was coming. So was your entire turdpile of a party. And you kept right on anyway. Go straight to hell, harpy.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Sweet Sabrina in the wildflowers, May 2008. What a little angel. We were walking Fred a couple of days ago and she asked me to tell her a story. She gave a lot of instructions about who was to be in the story (Sully and Mike from Monsters, Inc., Nemo, Marlin, Dory and some other Finding Nemo characters, and Monster Bear from the Little Bear chronicles) and what the setting was to be (the beach), and after a few minutes of story she exasperatedly told me that SHE would be telling the story from now on, thank you very much. And she did. And it was fantastic.

That's never happened before and I like it. Her imagination is so active, we have to be careful about discussing injuries and illness because she'll tell us she has a broken arm or a cold if she's heard about one or the other that day. I'm worried we'll miss a real problem because we read a story about that problem just before it actually happened. Silly . . .

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

I have had it with Obama's pathetic attempts to lie about recent history in hopes of getting elected to a position he has zero ability to deal with. Here's his most recent nonsense on parade, in which he tries to pin the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Republicans:

Fannie and Freddie have been creations of the congressional democrats and the Clinton white house, designed to make mortgages available to more people, and as it turned out, some people who couldn’t afford them. Fannie and Freddie have also been places for big Washington democrats to go to work in the semi-private sector and pocket millions. The Clinton administration’s white house budget director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected 50 million dollars. Jamie Gurilli, Clinton Justice Apartment Official, worked for Fannie and took home 26 million dollars. Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae C.E.O. job.

Now remember, Obama’s ads and stump speeches attack McCain and republican policies for the current financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggy’s lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks.

Emphasis mine. This is par for the course for Obama, who wouldn't have anything to say during campaign stops if he didn't lie his ass off. The press won't challenge him on it, so most people will never know. That sucks. Furthermore, if he's going to lie, he could at least learn the names of things:

“The fact that we have reached a point where the Federal Reserve felt it had to take this unprecedented step with the American Insurance Group is the final verdict on the failed economic philosophy of the last eight years . . ."

American International Group, you moron.

Update: More of the same. Why isn't any of this being reported in the mainstream media? It's the biggest story of the year, if you ask me, that the very financial disasters that are throwing the country, really the world, into a tailspin, are directly linked to the sleazy and dishonest behavior of the Democratic presidential nominee. Disgusting.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Found this at One Cosmos, which is always a blast when you're feeling extra smart and thoughtful. The column in question is a beauty:

The Left always counts its presidential chickens before they're hatched. They did it with Algore, they did it with Kerry. They think they have victory in their grasp, and when reality says otherwise they feel robbed and betrayed. They have to find dark plots and conspiracies to explain the impossible; the Supreme Court was corrupt in stopping the Al Gore assault on the election rules in Florida. Ohio's voting machines were hacked to give George W. Bush his win there. Today, Algore is still bulking up with rage, eight years after Florida. Kerry still thinks he was "swiftboated" -- when his Swiftboat chain of command finally got its chance to tell the truth. Rapper P. Diddy was on YouTube yesterday going "Alaska? Alaska?" and "McCain, you're getting the *** out of town."

It's the gangster theory of electoral democracy. They're all counting on victory. It's theirs already. Like the Obama campaign keeps telling us, the election is just a formality. We have a new president, and his name starts with an O.

The Left is entitled to power, because in their own eyes they have Truth and Morality on their side. They are Mahatma Gandhi, they are Dr. King, they are the vanguard of the marching proletariat. It's not just Big O who has the incomprehensible egomania. His inner circle and vast numbers of his supporters do, too. Entitlement, grandiosity, narcissism: In psychiatric thinking they all suffer from secret feelings of inferiority, narcissistic wounds to their self-esteem. Every time they lose, those nagging feelings come up again. So they are always overcompensating, trying to bully reality into the shape they need.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Check out Bob's piece on this piece for more red meat.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Lots of political stuff going on recently: Obama's big speech and the shameless media handjob that followed it; McCain naming Palin as his running mate and the nauseating shower of hatefulness from liberal bloggers and TV personalities thereafter. Here are two of my favorite blog posts in the wake of all that.

First, a column about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers by one of the people Ayers tried to kill when he was bombing things; then an interesting side-by-side comparison of Obama and Palin.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Joe Biden is a real turd of a VP candidate, and I couldn't be more happy about it. All the video of Obama and him ripping each other over the Democratic nomination will be great fun, but this, and all of the other fun stuff we'll be seeing soon about him, is even better.

Monday, August 18, 2008

I consider Theodore Dalrymple one of the best writers and thinkers in the world today, and this column of his is shocking, chilling, and dead right in a number of ways. As in most of his work, he manages to opine on moral decay in a non-preachy, even non-judgmental way. Read it and weep, it's nasty medicine but damn good for you.